


A Riddle

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Monster Prom (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pokemon Fusion, Established Relationship, Evil Teams, M/M, Outlaw Couple, P-P-P-P-Plot Twiiiists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23862973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Oz's partner is trainer of a Crobat (the most obnoxiously obvious Pokemon for him to have) with the move Frustration.
Relationships: Liam de Lioncourt/Yellow | Oz
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15
Collections: Minigame: Round 1





	A Riddle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Panny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panny/gifts).



Oz stood… politely behind Liam, his hands folded at the ends of straight arms behind his back.

Politely.

...But stiffly.

His Gastly had misfired her Mean Look, and not only had the Hitmonchan of the trainer they’d accosted been rooted to the spot, so had the trainer.

He hoped Liam taking the opportunity to fuckin’ _go off_ on the guy would keep him from thinking too much about him and his faux pas, ‘cause heck if Oz wasn’t going to be haunted by how this happened for the rest of the evening.

“First of all,” said Liam, taking one insistent step forward, eyes narrowed and little muscles in his face twisted as if he had heard someone call his mother a particularly vulgar word, “it’s called self-awareness? You know, _irony?_ ”

This was roughly the way many of Liam’s rants began.

Including this one, which Oz knew just about as well as Liam himself, by now.

Despite it being _quite_ a rant.

Liam rolled his eyes along with a series of animated head-tosses, flapping a hand in the air with a deliberate carelessness, for maximum _psshaw_ -factor. “Yes, yes, Zubat is such an obvious Pokemon for a vampire to train, _blah blah blah_. Almost _offensively_ so, albeit not as offensive as assuming my relationship with my vampire sire is one in which I carry her around in my fanny pack while I’m out acting as a participant in crime sprees so I can force her to enable me as I give her combat orders toward my mugging people.”

He _had_ , in fact, essentially heard his mother insulted.

Oz’s invisible lips invisibly thinned recollecting it. That feeling of _ohh, geez, this one’s got a storm coming._

“It’s so insultingly obvious that no other self-respecting vampire is a trainer of bat Pokemon - and if they _must_ be, then they use one of the more _bat-adjacent_ Pokemon, such as Noivern, or an illegal attempt at cloning a Latios then dressed as Lunala - and as _I_ am a self-respecting vampire, my possession of a Crobat partner is _so_ obvious that it wraps back around to being original and unexpected. _That’s_ how it works.”

The position-locked and speechless trainer exchanged a corner-glance with his Hitmonchan.

The glance flicked to Oz.

Once Oz processed the lack of a glare and thus the momentary flash of panic passed, he tilted his head a little, offered a sheepish smile which he hoped showed in his eyes.

He had long since lost the inclination to _empathetically shrug_ on receiving these kinds of looks. 

He thought he got the logic now, at least as Liam believed it.

“And I’m aware,” Liam carried on, refocusing the trainer’s attention with a lift of a finger, “that a Crobat with Frustration in its moveset is completely inexplicable on the face of it.” He jabbed that finger forward; the trainer flinched. “Why do you think she still has it?”

Still, Oz noted, with a moment of contemplative stillness in his mind, quiet-lake-like.

Liam had definitely said that by accident.

And not noticed his slip-up as his face twisted further and in new directions, into a just-fang-baring smirk that was all spite. “Certain things are more important than winning battles through sheer attack power - and, in fact, you _ignorant plebe_ , some things are more important than winning battles, period!” A momentary flash-up to showing every friggin’ bit of his fangs as his eyes shot narrow. One more punctuating jab in the air. “Like keeping _fools guessing._ ”

...Oz kinda flinched, still, at some of the kinds of things Liam said.

Such as here - he stepped back, hands flying back to tuck themselves up in front of his shoulders, while his Gastly flew up beside him behind one of those shoulders, and his Misdreavus did so behind the other.

...He looked at the Gastly for some comfort, first, and found her unsmiling, on giving her a corner-glance much the way the frozen trainer had given his Hitmonchan. Then he turned it on the Misdreavus, who caught the proverbial ball and passed it back to the Gastly, who caught it likewise.

...He rested a little bit, then, bizarrely, as he saw Liam’s smile disappear. His face start to flatten, then stiffen. Liam took a half-step back, eyes half-lidded and that bitter grin replaced by a disinterested sag, and held out a hand. His last two fingers twitched curls in.

“Now, hand over those evolutionary stones.”

The trainer complied. Two Thunderstones and - damn, three Dusk Stones, Team Spooky Boss Spider would sure be happy with that haul - plopped into Liam’s hand between three grabs and drops into aforementioned fanny pack.

At which point, Liam wheeled on his boots with a wooshy-yet-rumbling sigh, his head lowering and his ears - truly shaped like that of a Zubat’s - stretching to lie flat, the stylized Pumpkaboo on his jacket flashing practically neon in the moment of all-the-more direct exposure to the light of the sunset before it disappeared as he faced Oz. Stalking toward him, slit-pupils pinned forward under unamused half-lidding. Leaving human and Hitmonchan be.

They’d be fine once Oz returned Gastly to her Pokeball.

Later.

Oz frowned, eyes shifting in shape as he questioningly knit an undiscernible brow.

“A - ...you okay…?” he asked, high. Light.

There were many subjects Liam in fact enjoyed ranting and arguing about.

The subject of his bats was not one of them; rather, it was more compulsion.

“I’m fine,” Liam said, drawn but pinched. And then, in another act that Oz could sense bordered on compulsion, “Let’s go, Joy, Faith, Hope…”

His hand plunged back into his fanny pack as Oz turned to walk beside him forward-onward. Came out palm-up holding a trio of Pokeballs. He shuffled them in a circle once, twice, before tossing them high into the air, not looking, with a flick of his wrist.

Three synchronized pops as a Crobat burst into the trees above them, and a Golbat, and a Zubat, quickly stabilizing and flying over them in a flurry of wings.

And Liam continued to look forward. Eyes dull.

In a tiny, muffled grumble, Oz heard, “ _So exasperating_.”

...Oz noted, a brow arched and palms-up slightly for an invisible “cushion” as he half-questioned pointing it out, that Liam still seemed very much not to notice how he’d slipped up in his _spiel._

Really, it was that that had made him wonder if something was different. If Liam was more perturbed than usual, and if he should have sensed it. Tentatively, he let it go. For now.

While also telling himself that it could be important. That he might as well watch.

The whole part where he’d admitted Joy _still_ had Frustration, as opposed to just having it, had made that chunk of his rant, this time, all quite true. She _still_ had it now because Liam truly did prioritize keeping marks and other prospective battle opponents guessing while working within certain limits, being creative and clever, over battling effectively.

Why she had it in the first place was a whole ‘nother story.

One involving a boy named Angel, whose first-ever Pokemon friend was a Zubat, who he would follow back to the mouth of her colony’s cave on watching her night flights, and sit there with a lamp until morning, watching with joy as the bats flew in and out and danced around him, before on one night, one of the bats dropped to the ground in front of him, and turned into something that looked at once like a Zubat and a person, and asked him if he’d like to be a bat, too.

That boy had loved being a bat. As a bat, he had felt more like himself than he ever thought he could before, brimming with power and _joie de vivre_ , as Oz recalled. He had convinced his Zubat friend and her two best friends to come with him as he left his home in the middle of the night to become a Pokemon trainer, and during his career, he had met other people who were also bats, and with them, together, they had formed Team Noir.

Angel had been the leader of Team Noir. He had reveled in the power and the significance, including among other bats. _The bat who devoured other bats to gain their power_ , had been one of his nicknames, the story said. He worked his bat friend and her bat friends ruthlessly to keep their image dark and looming high, and taught them Frustration so as to reap the full benefits from this approach.

Then, to cement Team Noir as true _terrors of the night_ , in solitude but for two Golbats and a Zubat flapping in the air above him, Angel had summoned Darkrai.

Darkrai had been easily beaten, Oz remembers, still feeling the bruise with some self-deprecating amusement now - Joy had been _one overleveled Golbat._

But, once caught, Darkrai had been resistant to Angel’s commands. He had never been overt about striking terror into the hearts of others; operating through the realms of dreams was far quieter. More psychological. Even he had cowered from Angel, and ironically, this had resulted in Angel being humiliated. To save face, at first, he had begun attempting to persuade Darkrai into obedience through his bat friends. His first friend was having none of that, and had wanted quite the opposite to happen. She had suggested that Darkrai find some way to speak with Angel by himself, for himself.

And so Darkrai had.

He had explained himself, and he had explained what he had heard from Joy, and Faith, and Hope.

And in the end, Angel had left Team Noir - in the dead of one night, the same way he had left to become a Pokemon trainer. So had Darkrai, never changing back from the form he had assumed, Angel likewise planning on never on changing back from Liam.

Oz liked both their renamings. He’d never been too fond of how… _extra_ Liam’s planned matching nicknames for them had been, though they had been perfectly… well, Liam. _Angelus and Ozymandius._ (From his understanding, the second one hadn’t even been spelled correctly.)

But he’d found the _nickname of the nickname_ perfectly workable. Kinda nice. Almost friendly-sounding. _Liam and Oz_.

Meanwhile, while he himself had thoroughly accepted them, he supposed, as a master of fear, that, well… _fear_ was the reason Liam hated repeating their lies. He was afraid of what he’d been in the past, he was afraid of them being exposed, maybe both.

...Oz thinned his non-lips again.

Gingerly, gingerly, he began to… tilt the direction of his walking to intersect more and more with Liam’s. One hand, now, just-raised. Studying the side of his face in repeated glances and glimpses.

He hovered for a moment - Liam’s ear turned, but otherwise gave no sign of recognizing his presence, which was a good sign - and then… let their hips lightly bump together. Liam’s pupil flicked towards him. Still no resistance - he set that lifted hand on his back.

And Liam sighed. Head dropping.

A rueful little knit to his brow.

...And Oz smiled, gently.

Trying to send _good_ vibes his way. Suck the fear out of him, or whatever. They _had_ come a long way, the two of them.

...Joy still had Frustration because Liam felt _reassured_ by the knowledge that it was a shitty move for her to have, Oz mused.


End file.
